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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24953581">Sea Born, Man Torn, Blood Blest</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux'>reine_des_corbeaux</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anal Sex, Blasphemy, Dream Sex, Folklore, Ghost Sex, Horror, Human Sacrifice, Internalized Homophobia, Loss of Faith, M/M, Misuse of Religious Objects, Object Insertion, Priests, Religious Imagery &amp; Symbolism, Rough Oral Sex, cosmic horror</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 09:22:15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>10,091</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24953581</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/reine_des_corbeaux/pseuds/reine_des_corbeaux</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Father Jonah Lindsey wishes only to do penance on the island of Skara. It's too bad his sleep is so unquiet, and that something malevolent may haunt St. Conmor's Church.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Ghost of a Church Foundation Sacrifice/Penitent Praying at his Church</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>58</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Nonconathon 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Sea Born, Man Torn, Blood Blest</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeathCorporal/gifts">DeathCorporal</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
<em>“There is no wonder in death, and hell is not as it is reported,” -- Oran of Iona</em>
</p><p>
Jonah Lindsey arrived on Skara looking rather greenish, with unsteady legs, and with all his worldly possessions packed into an oilcloth rucksack and an old wooden wine crate. The longboatmen had grumbled about the wine crate as they heaved it onto the dock along with Jonah, and he felt he looked vaguely ridiculous with it, which was probably a stupid worry, all things considered. He’d had a nice leather trunk, but it had been left behind at the seminary when one of the priests mentioned that technically, it was still the seminary’s property, and thus belonged to the parish, really, and not to Jonah. The implication being, of course, that nearly-defrocked junior priests being sent to penance posts didn’t deserve nice luggage. Jonah resented that immensely, and he hoped that the books in the crate, carefully wrapped in oilskins, had survived the three days by coach from Morvihan to Pennarbed, and the five-day sea passage from Pennarbed to Skara. 
</p><p>
	His legs shook as he stood on the quay, seagulls screaming above the town, which was tidier than he’d expected, and larger too, whitewashed buildings slinking up to the harbor’s edge and scattered along the steep hill leading up to the tumulus, the sturdy spire of a parish church rising about the splay of houses on the shore. And above it all, proud and fantastical, rose the spiral of St. Conmor’s Church, blossoming in the sky above its parish close. Seeing it sent a strange thrill through Jonah, a tingling of anticipation and a sharp stab of regret all at once. This was his home now, even if he was thinking about the briar and the rose in the St. Mael parish close back in Morvihan, and the legend of Jenova and Iannic. He rubbed at his rosary idly, just as the longboatmen let down another crate with a tremendous thump and he suddenly heard a voice. 
</p><p>
	“Father Lindsey, is that you? I’m Annaig Kernoa.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah knew someone was meeting him, but when Father Manec told him he’d be housed with a “goodwife of the island” until he could move into the priest’s house on the St. Mairaig close, he’d expected some thin, shrieking seagull of a woman, decked out in the clothes of the last century and jingling with rosaries and sacred medals. Islanders were supposed to be superstitious, after all. But Annaig Kernoa was tall, plump and dressed in a well-cut dress with a lace apron, not a rosary to be seen. Only her eyes, piercing and dark, seemed birdlike, and only the lace coif on her head marked her as anything unlike the city women of Morvihan and Pennarbed. 
</p><p>
	“It’s me,” he said, holding out a hand for her to shake. “Father Jonah Lindsey, of Morvihan, despite the name.” 
</p><p>
	“Well, Father Lindsey, as I said, I’m the Mrs. Kernoa who you’ve been told about your superiors. It’s a great honor to meet you, and to welcome a new priest to Skara. Now, we’d best get you up the hill. Brannoc! Where’s your saintsblest handcart?” 
</p><p>
	This she cried out to one of the longboatmen, who commenced to cry back at Mrs. Kernoa in a dialect Jonah only half understood. It took some time, but she managed to procure a battered handcart, and to lift Jonah’s wine crate on it quite easily. He supposed that besides the books for Father Lanval, he didn’t have much. Everything real and true and precious to him was in the rucksack, or in his heart.
</p><p>
	Looking out at the sea, Jonah watched the light playing over the dark blue expanse of water, the tall, dark silhouette of the Watchers, the great twin lighthouses of the Outer Isles, visible on the horizon, and tried to smile. Here he was, on Skara, and his soul was in penance now. He’d have to start anew, even if his heart ached with the very idea of leaving everything behind. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	Mrs. Kernoa talked the whole way up the hill, a litany of places and events and descriptions of people that she assured Jonah he’d meet as soon as he was properly settled in at the priest’s house. Jonah let her talk, and looked around. He’d expected something different, perhaps, he was embarrassed to realize, a circle of stone beehive huts like he’d seen in pictures. But whitewashed houses with slate roofs and cobbled streets were all he saw, with their bright flowers in small window-boxes and tabby cats curled on sun-warmed stoops. 
</p><p>
	“These are the outskirts of Skara town,” Mrs. Kernoa continued. “Those closest to the Watchers and furthest from the headlands. Decent people live about here, so don’t fear for your safety in my home.” 
</p><p>
	Mrs. Kernoa’s house was a tall, slim, slate-roofed building, with a flower on the doorstep and lace curtains in the window. The door was painted red, with a brass knocker ever so slightly greened by the sea breeze. Mrs. Kernoa rummaged for her key, which hung at her side, and opened the door briskly. 
</p><p>
	“I’ll put the water on for tea,” she said, lifting Jonah’s wine chest from the handcart and carrying it over the stoop. “Make yourself quite at home in the sitting room. I’ll have Paul take your things up to the attic.” 
</p><p>
	The house, once Jonah was inside, consisted of a small, dark hallway leading to a wooden door set slightly ajar, with another door on the left and a staircase of dark wood to the right. An oil lamp hung from the ceiling like a chandelier, and a worn rag rug lay across the scrubbed wood floor. Mrs. Kernoa placed the wine chest near the stairwell, then climbed to the second step and shouted up. 
</p><p>
	“Paul! The new Father from the mainland’s here! Dress decently!” 
</p><p>
	Jonah didn’t dare ask who Paul was as Mrs. Kernoa shepherded him into the sitting room on  the other side of the hall. Like the entrance, it too bespoke an air of shabby comfort. There was kindling laid in a grate at one end, with another oil lamp hanging from the ceiling, and a few framed engravings of sailing ships on the wall. Three overstuffed and moth-eaten armchairs sat close to fire, clustered as if in conversation, and a dark wood table near the door was laid with a lace cloth and a vase of wildflowers. 
</p><p>
	“Sit, sit!” Mrs. Kernoa said, pulling out one of the table chairs. 
</p><p>
	Uncertain of what else to do, Jonah sat. Mrs. Kernoa beamed, then bustled back out of the door, presumably in the direction of the kitchen. Finally alone, Jonah looked around, privately despairing at the lack of a bookcase. There were, however, a few volumes scattered about the room. On a side table, Jonah spotted the familiar red binding of a novel that had been popular during his second year in seminary, a sort of forbidden fruit then, as the fathers found it indecent. He remembered trudging out on his one free day to a disreputable bookseller in an alley off the market square, using filched tithe money to buy a copy that would be passed around to every other student deemed gentleman enough to refrain from sneaking.
</p><p>
	On the mantelpiece, two volumes sat: a family Bible and a slim volume bound in blue fabric. Curious at the sight of the unfamiliar book, Jonah walked over to the mantel to attempt to read it. Unfortunately, the lettering was rather cracked, and the room was dark. Carefully, Jonah reached for the Bible and moved it aside. He’d just picked up the book beneath it when the door to the sitting room swung open. 
</p><p>
	“What are you doing?” said someone, his voice thick with an unfamiliar accent. “Are you the priest?” 
</p><p>
	Jonah turned, book in hand, and felt the breath leave his lungs. The man in the doorway was young and dressed in simple black and white, his dark hair bound out of his tanned and freckled face into a short tail. He looked suspiciously at Jonah with green eyes, and Jonah wanted to flee. This, he thought, was the real punishment: finding himself in the same room as surpassing beauty, but unable to touch the beautiful one even in the most innocent of ways. 
</p><p>
	Jonah nodded in the young man’s direction, and, placed the book back on the shelf. He read the title now: <em>The Monks from Beyond the Sea: Faith in the Outer Isles of the Missionary Age</em>. The author, beneath it, was listed as G. Manec. Probably only a devotional of some sort. Jonah walked over, trying to look as confident as possible. He was certain that it didn’t really work. 
</p><p>
	“Father Jonah Lindsey,” he said, extending his hand. “Pleased to meet you. You must be--”
</p><p>
	“Paul Kernoa. You’ve met my mother.” 
</p><p>
	Paul shook Jonah’s hand, then walked to the table and nearly threw himself into one of the sturdy wicker chairs around the little table. 
</p><p>
	“I have met your mother,” Jonah said as he walked to join him. “She’s a marvelous woman,” he added, because it seemed polite. 
</p><p>
	“She’s alright.” Paul shrugged. “Interesting reading choice there, by the way. You interested in the history of the Barriers? Or was it the monks bit in the title? I <em>told </em>Father Manec he needed to pick a better one.” 
</p><p>
	The way he said “Barriers” sounded like a proper noun. 
</p><p>
	“The Barriers?” Jonah asked. “I didn’t get a proper look at the book, I’m afraid. Do you know Father Manec?” 
</p><p>
	He realized how stupid he sounded. Of course Paul Kernoa would know his parish priest, especially with a mother as ostensibly God-fearing as Mrs. Kernoa. However, Paul coughed out some word that sounded a lot like “mainlanders” and rolled his eyes in response. 
</p><p>
	“The Outer Isles. The Skara Archipelago. The Kingdom of the Blessed. Whatever you want to call it. You’d better call them the Barriers while you’re here though. Father Manec might slap you if you don’t-- he did me when I was helping him.” 
</p><p>
	He hadn’t dignified Jonah’s question with a response. 
</p><p>
	“Helping him?”<br/>
But before Paul could answer, Mrs. Kernoa came bustling back into the room with a cake on a silver tray in one hand. She placed the cake, a low, yellow thing dotted with candied violets, next to the flowers, and smiled at Paul. 
</p><p>
	“Paul! How lovely. Father Lindsey, is he entertaining you? I’ll be back with the tea. And let Father Manec in when he knocks, won’t you, Paul?” 
</p><p>
	“Wouldn’t dream of otherwise.” 
</p><p>
	Mrs. Kernoa bustled out again, leaving Paul and Jonah alone to stare suspiciously at the cake. Jonah’s mouth watered to look at it, already imagining the dense, buttery flavor melting across his tongue. 
</p><p>
	“She’s pulled all the stops for you,” Paul remarked. “Usually it’s a fruitcake out of a tin for Sunday tea. Better than the biscuit and cheese on Seal Head Rock, though.” 
</p><p>
	There was a knocking at the door, and Paul bounded up to go answer it as Mrs. Kernoa came back with the tea-tray, bearing a teapot, several cups, and a plate of bread and butter. She placed it on the table and poured the tea before sitting down. She smiled at Jonah, and he tried to smile back in his most priestly manner as Jonah returned, leading a short, white-haired man in a priest’s cassock behind him. Mrs. Kernoa stood and curtsied, and reflexively, Jonah stood as well. The man glared at him through half-moon glasses. 
</p><p>
	“Are you the new assistant priest?” he asked as he sat down. 
</p><p>
	“Yes, Father Manec,” Jonah said. “I’m here to assist you in any way I can.” 
</p><p>
	Father Manec looked him over.<br/>
“So you are. And in which church are you to do penance?” 
</p><p>
	Jonah blushed scarlet. He’d meant to keep that part of his stay secret, or at least as secret as possible, from his hosts and from the rest of the Skara parishioners. But here it was, and the interest on Paul’s face was too blatant to deny. 
</p><p>
	“St. Conmor’s,” he said, and Father Manec’s face darkened. 
</p><p>
	“There are rules for Conmor’s church,” he said. “Always carry a cross and a trefoil, and never go alone.” 
</p><p>
	“Same for the old monks’ church on the headland,” Paul said. “But Mum doesn’t care about all this, does she?” 
</p><p>
	Mrs. Kernoa, who was slicing the cake, shook her head as she placed perfectly equal slices on each dainty plate. 
</p><p>
	“I’d rather you stopped talking about dusty old stone and started eating. They don’t feed you lightkeepers enough at the Watchers.” 
</p><p>
	“You’re a keeper on Seal Head?” Jonah asked. 
</p><p>
	“Guilty,” Paul said around a mouthful of cake. “Father Manec got me the job.” 
</p><p>
	Father Manec shrugged. 
</p><p>
	“Good to have living eyes on the Dead Eye.” 
</p><p>
	“I keep on the Living Eye,” Paul snapped. “Don’t have nothing to do with the Dead light.” 
</p><p>
	Mrs. Kernoa laughed  a little testily. 
</p><p>
	“Father Lindsey,” she said, “tell us about the mainland.” 
</p><p>
	He did, and each time he mentioned something-- the seminary, the legends of his home, his father’s foreign heritage, his mother’s death, Jonah felt a little closer to it. He’d make it back to the great city of Morvihan someday, and he’d be a priest, and maybe, just maybe, he’d see Bastien and recognize him at last, without lust, as a brother. Talking pleasantly at a table in a warm front parlor, he could almost feel that day in his grasp. This was what a priest was meant to do, after all. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	That night, Jonah knelt in Mrs. Kernoa’s attic room at a dusty prie-dieu, holding Bastien’s boxwood rosary bead in front of him, open to the Calvary scene. <em>Dear Lord, </em>he prayed, <em>let me find peace, and let my desires melt from me as does the morning dew upon the grass. As You suffered for us, let me now do the same. Make me an instrument of Your love, and banish from me all desire save the desire to know you. </em>
</p><p>
But as he fell to sleep on clean linen sheets, he saw Bastien’s dark eyes and smiling face and that day as they crossed the snowy cloister together replayed in his mind as he tossed and turned and heard the far-off crashing of the waves. 
</p><p>
	When he slept, Jonah found himself in a great cathedral with a ceiling so high and dark that he could not see the vaulting. All around him, the whispery sounds of water echoed in the darkness, and when he turned, he felt hands pressing against his back, stroking his bare skin. Lips whispered next to his ear, and he could not hear what they said. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	The next few days before Jonah was allowed to move into the priest’s house passed quickly. Every morning, he went down to the shore with his sketchbook to draw the waves, or the little fishing skiffs, or the Skara girls in their white coifs and dark dresses, gathering shellfish and kelp in enormous baskets. The horizon changed subtly each morning-- sometimes shrouded by fogs, other days a crisp blue line across the darker blue of the sea. But always, the Watchers loomed on the horizon, punctuating the bright sky with their ancient darkness, and at night, their lights shone over the water. 
</p><p>
	He walked in the town too, by the pub and the grocer’s and the market square, waving to the people who stared at him in his cassock, with sketchbook under his arm. Jonah stood outside the little close surrounding St. Mairaig’s Church, and tried to picture himself living in the tall stone house near the church. Bastien, he thought, would have loved the place, and called it romantic. He’d talked so often to Jonah of how, one day when they were both fully ordained, they’d find a parish in need of two priests and live together on its close, happy and secure in their love and in the love of God. Jonah felt his throat constrict with longing, and turned away. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	He dreamed himself into the dark cathedral every night until Sunday. The whispers seemed a little more intelligible each time.
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	On Sunday, Jonah went with Paul and Mrs. Kernoa to St. Conmor’s Church to start his penance. He dressed carefully, and he packed his rucksack and his wine crate, gently wrapping Bastien’s rosary bead in a bit of linen. After the service, Mrs. Kernoa would take his things to the priest’s house on the St. Mairaig close. He breakfasted with Paul and Mrs. Kernoa on buttered bread and salted herring, and then the three of them made their way up the tumulus to St. Conmor’s Church. 
</p><p>
	It was a fine, bright day, the sea crashing below them, and little knots of people walking up the path ahead and behind them, their chattering voices dancing on the sea breeze. Mrs. Kernoa wore a black gown and a high coif, her chatelaine jingling at her waist, and Paul had on a clean neckerchief pinned with a trefoil bead like the one on Jonah’s new rosary. 
</p><p>
	“Always carry trefoils in St. Conmor’s,” Paul explained as he handed it to Jonah. “Unless you want Father Manec to kick you out.” 
</p><p>
	The tumulus path was well-worn, but it rose in gentle loops along the hill, and Jonah enjoyed the view and the whirling seagulls in the wide blue sky above, and he liked hearing laughter all around him, and to see Mrs. Kernoa looking so pleased at all she surveyed. 
</p><p>
	“Today’s St. Conmor’s Day,” she explained happily. “There shall be a feast on the beach after the service, and after the solemn recitation of the mysteries.” 
</p><p>
	“She means the play,” Paul said. “Which you don’t have to watch. It’s after the Mass. Boys from the village school in bits of pasteboard and rags, playing at monks and pagans.” 
</p><p>
	Mrs. Kernoa cuffed him on the shoulder. 
</p><p>
	“Respect Father Manec’s work.” 
</p><p>
	“Father Manec hates the play.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah wisely kept his mouth shut, instead thinking about the ground beneath his feet. He’d read enough about Skara and the life of St. Conmor to know about the place. A great pagan grave, the tumulus had dominated the landscape for centuries, until missionary monks of the faith had come to the Outer Isles to bring the pagans to God. In this effort, a young slave-boy, Conmor, had helped them. A believer taken into slavery by emissaries of the king of Skara, he’d been intended for the king’s bed. But he refused him long enough to leap from the cliffs of Skara rather than be defiled, and God had allowed him to rise unharmed from the water long enough to tell the monks where to build their church, and to make it stand straight and tall. For that reason, Jonah knew, the people of Skara had a special affection for him, and his resolute protection of his chastity made him an ideal intercessor in Jonah’s own delicate case. 
</p><p>
	“The sermon,” Mrs. Kernoa said, jolting Jonah out of his thoughts, “is going to be in our local dialect. Quite fine if you can’t make heads or tails of it. Just look interested, and be happy to chat at the festival this evening, and no one will think less of you.” 
</p><p>
	They reached the top of the tumulus, where the church and parish close perched prettily in the sun. The gates stood open, ready to welcome a flock of parishioners. They came, Mrs. Kernoa said, from all sides of the island to St. Conmor’s on this one feast day, and Jonah was happy to join them behind the sea-stone walls. St. Conmor’s close was simple and austere-- Jonah barely glanced at it, instead looking at the church itself. Sunlight obscured the carvings on the walls, making the carved greenery on the facade dance and dazzle beneath new whitewash, and the fanciful creatures and carven saints grinned within these curlicues. But before Jonah could get a better look, Mrs. Kernoa was already shepherding him into a frescoed interior and into a pew before a high altar bearing a crucifix. 
</p><p>
	And nearly as soon as he’d sat, Father Manec began the service. Though Jonah couldn’t understand the dialect, he could tell that everything was more or less as he expected from the services he’d helped officiate on the mainland. He looked instead at the altar, and its elegant paintings of St. Conmor’s stories, and tried to look as though he were paying attention to Father Manec’s mumblings. Although he could not understand, Jonah could tell by watching that Father Manec preached like a professor lacking notes, and until the final benediction, when his voice became sonorous and rich, sounded rather bored with the whole affair. 
</p><p>
	After concluding the service, Father Manec joined Jonah and the Kernoas at their pew. 
</p><p>
	“Welcome to St. Conmor’s. You’ll take the services here eventually,” he said to Jonah. “But first, you’d better go and do your penance. Ten novenas in the relic chapel, on your knees.” 
</p><p>
	He lapsed then into harsh dialect, clearly directed at a rather impassive Paul. Knowing he was no longer needed, Jonah walked to the church’s one side chapel, a dark room lacking the whitewash and paint of the greater building. The altar before him was low and dark, with a carven inscription. Jonah deciphered it quickly: <em>Beneath this stone rests Conmor, who gave his blood to build the gates of God. </em>A cold chill ran down the back of his neck, but he still knelt to pray as the church emptied of people. 
</p><p>
	After he’d finished his prayers, Jonah left to find either Father Manec or the Kernoas in St. Conmor’s rather dilapidated close. He came across Paul in front of a raised wooden platform upon which several small boys were reenacting the martyrdom of St. Conmor. One of them, clearly chosen for his golden hair and not his acting prowess, was in the process of jumping from a stack of boxes meant to represent the headland, while another in a paper beard ranted and raved behind him. Jonah tapped Paul on the shoulder to get his attention. 
</p><p>
	“Oh, Father Lindsey. Done already?”<br/>
Jonah nodded. “Thought I might watch the play.” 
</p><p>
	“You really don’t need to. If you stay on after your penance, you’ll see it again. It’s the same every year. Has been since I was a kid.” 
</p><p>
	“Who did you play?”  
</p><p>
	“The king, once, but mostly monks.” Paul laughed. “I was Conmor one year, but everyone agreed I only got it because Mum cleans the priest’s house.” 
</p><p>
	They watched the play in silence for awhile, and although the sun shone still, Jonah felt cold in the shadow of the church. His neck prickled, as though something watched him.
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	The festival of St. Conmor took place largely at dusk on the town beach, spilling people from all over the island out about the harbor and the shore. The smoke and sparks of bonfires rose up into the air along with voices raised in the old songs and the wailing of stringed instruments. Over the water, the sun sank and the Watchers brightened to guide ships in the falling night. 
</p><p>
	Jonah made his way between knots of people away from the dancing and from one of the large fires to sit at a trestle table dragged onto the shore. <em>Bastien would have loved this</em>, he thought, looking over towards a table laden with food. Mrs. Kernoa stood behind it, serving cake and stew to those who came to her. She waved at Jonah. 
</p><p>
	“Have you seen my Paul?” she shouted. 
</p><p>
	As she did so, Paul emerged from the crowd with two tankards. 
</p><p>
	“I brought you cider, Father Lindsey,” he said to Jonah. “You’ll need it. Father Manec hasn’t got anything but mainland apple brandy and stale tea in his house.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah didn’t usually drink, but after the brief conversation in the close that afternoon, he’d begun to feel a strange sort of kinship with Paul Kernoa. Probably, he thought, it was simply his loneliness and desire to talk with someone, anyone, close to his own age. For that reason, he gratefully took the cider, and took a gulp. 
</p><p>
	Before too long, the night was fully dark, and the songs were louder. Mrs. Kernoa left her place behind the meal table to take another woman’s place in the dancing circle, yelling something unintelligible to Paul, who was just returning with more cider. 
</p><p>
	“What did she say?” Jonah asked, the alcohol loosening his tongue. 
</p><p>
	“That we ought to get Father Manec back to the priest’s house before he comes to blows with the schoolmaster over St. Conmor. Come with? Cider first, of course.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah had nothing better to do, so he nodded and took the second cider. It too impacted him, and before he knew it, he was spilling everything to Paul, who listened with benign interest as he spoke of his love for Bastien, and how they’d been discovered in their usual safe haven in the vestry. He told him everything: how Bastien had taken the blame for corrupting Jonah and been thrown from the seminary before he could even begin to serve. 
</p><p>
	“He only wanted to be a priest. He loved God more than anyone I’ve ever known, and wanted everyone to love just as much. He even gave me a boxwood rosary bead to remember him by, because he thought that love was God and God was love. And they stripped it all from him and not from me.” 
</p><p>
	Paul nodded, and Jonah felt as though a weight had lifted while also dousing him in mud. The confession cleared his mind even as it filled him with a powerful need to repent. But Paul still looked at him evenly. 
</p><p>
	“Let’s get you to the priest’s house then,” Paul said at last. 
</p><p>
	They left without Father Manec. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	As a legacy of his work with the priest, or possibly by virtue of his mother’s position, Paul had keys to both the close and the priest’s snug little house. He let them into the snug little priest’s house, kicked off his boots, and showed Jonah the way to the kitchen. There, he lit a lantern and fiddled with the stove in order to start tea. 
</p><p>
	“Father Manec likes his tea steeped to death,” Paul said, measuring leaves from a canister into a pot. “He also likes it with bread and butter. Never herring. Fruitcake’s every second Sunday, when he doesn’t have tea at Mum’s.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah’s head was still spinning from his confession and from the cider, so he sat down and watched Paul preparing the tea tray with the same quick movements Mrs. Kernoa used to lay a table. Out in the hall, the door slammed. 
</p><p>
	“That’ll be Father Manec,” Paul muttered. 
</p><p>
	“Paul!” Father Manec bellowed. “Bring Father Lindsey and the tea tray to the study. And don’t forget the brandy.” 
</p><p>
	Paul rolled his eyes. 
</p><p>
	“Always the brandy. He keeps the glasses in the study, by the way.” 
</p><p>
	“I’m not his servant,” Jonah snapped. 
</p><p>
	“No, you’re his assistant. So you’ll listen to him talk, and you’ll smile and nod and take him his tea and take down his letters to his publisher about his semi-heretical books. Follow me.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah did, mulling over all that Paul had said until they came to the study, where Father Manec was laying a fire. 
</p><p>
	“I ought to fire the schoolmaster,” Father Manec remarked. “You, Jonah Lindsey, what do you know about foundation sacrifices?” 
</p><p>
	Jonah was taken aback. 
</p><p>
	“Not much, Father. A pagan superstition?” 
</p><p>
	Father Manec coughed. 
</p><p>
	“And the monks from beyond the sea?” 
</p><p>
	Jonah did know that one. 
</p><p>
	“They brought the Outer Isles to God.” 
</p><p>
	Father Manec snorted. 
</p><p>
	“Paul, he’s even more ignorant than I thought. I told them to send me someone who’d studied at the university. Not this… penitent student chaplain who’ll wind up getting eaten alive by the lords of the deep.” 
</p><p>
	He waved in Jonah’s direction, sending a prickle of offense down Jonah’s spine. He’d been a perfectly decent chaplain and only sometimes skived off to read novels in the library when he should have been assisting in the chapel. 
</p><p>
	“The thing in the Dead Eye’s quiet, Father. He’ll be fine,” Paul snapped. “Just tell him what’s wrong and he’ll learn. His sin’s the same as mine. Same as yours.” 
</p><p>
	“That at least is a relief,” Father Manec said. “As Paul appears to have neglected to tell you this, I study the early monks of the Barriers. They came in three waves. The first monks were good believers from the mainland, most of whom died in some unknown disaster shortly before the second wave of monks, known as the monks from beyond the sea, came to Skara, aided by St. Conmor. They built many churches, and then moved on, shortly to be followed by the third wave of monks, from the mainland. The second wave, we know, engaged in building using the practice of human sacrifice, burying bone and blood beneath the keystone so that the building lay straight.” 
</p><p>
	“And,” Paul said darkly, “to serve their own gods. Father Manec doesn’t think they really served our Lord. He’s read the sources, and the sources speak of eyes in the deep. Because no one knows what lies so far over the sea in that direction. Only that something does, and that it watches and waits without end. The Barriers were meant by the first monks to protect from it, with their headland churches.” 
</p><p>
	“But the first monks,” Father Manec continued, “were all killed, and the second monks built a gate instead. They used the tumuli, and they used their sacrifices, and they built the Watcher light known as the Dead Eye to lure ships, and they walled up saints alive in their churches to become something else and feed upon prayers. This is why the third group of monks built new churches, so that we would not feed the creatures of the deeps, or untold horrors might occur. This is why you must follow my instructions in St. Conmor’s.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah nodded, but his head spun. 
</p><p>
	“I understand,” he said. “And is this why I must bear my trefoil?” 
</p><p>
	“Indeed. It’s an old sign, older than the cross, but it too represents the Trinity, and in that it will protect you. Worst comes to worst, there is a trefoil on the base of the altar cross in St. Conmor’s. Use it as a ward, and you will escape more or less unscathed. Now, how much cider did Paul give you?” 
</p><p>
	“Two mugs, but I think he’s a lightweight,” Paul said. “Dunno if you want to hear about the Dead Eye’s movements before I leave in the morning, but I can show him the spare room and then talk to you.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah felt suddenly exhausted, his mind reeling with Father Manec’s paranoid ramblings about eyes in the deep, and he suddenly wanted nothing more than to close his eyes. Gratefully, he followed Paul down a narrow hallway to a room with a window out onto the town and down to the sea. Sitting on the narrow bed, he had only a moment of peace before he fell, blessedly, asleep. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	Tonight, Jonah dreamed again of the cathedral. This time, he saw himself spread upon the altar, his hands open, bearing a goblet in one palm and the Host in another, with a crucifix at his head. His eyes were closed, and his dreamself was naked as a child in the whispering darkness. Jonah watched his own chest rise and fall, and heard, very faintly, the cry of a sea bird as the cathedral filled with a waxy yellow light that made the ceiling vaulting seem all the darker. 
</p><p>
	From the forest of columns and the dark flagstone floor rose a young man. Had he been kneeling, Jonah wondered, or had he risen from the ground itself? He didn’t know. He only knew that the young man was golden-haired and naked from the waist up. His skin shone pale under a shifting tapestry of woad-blue paint: eyes and plants and even a few trefoil motifs. His forehead bore a cross, and he glanced behind him into the hissing, shifting darkness behind the light, nodded, and walked up to Jonah. <em>He is a sacrifice for the foundations</em>, Jonah thought immediately, unsure how he knew this to be true. 
</p><p>
	He smelled of death and incense, and he took the wine and raised it to his lips. He ate the Host from Jonah’s hand, and it sounded like crunching bone. Then he ran his tongue up Jonah’s palm, and Jonah’s dreamself shuddered under the uncanny cold of it. Then, the young man took the cross that stood at Jonah’s head, and silently, walked to Jonah’s feet. 
</p><p>
	“Lift your hips,” he hissed. “Or this will be very difficult.” 
</p><p>
	Every atom of Jonah’s being revolted against it, but as the young man whispered, Jonah found his watching spirit drawn into his dreamself’s motionless body, felt his hips moving as though they were pulled. He wanted to scream, but his lips remained sealed as though they had been sewn. 
</p><p>
	There was something warm and slick at his entrance, and though he tried to writhe away, he found that he could not. He realized, with a start, that they were fingers, prodding him open. He tried to breathe, tried to pretend that it was Bastien who worked him open, and not this unfamiliar man’s hands. But he could not. He could only lean into the sensation and pray that it would be over soon. 
</p><p>
	It was and it wasn’t. The fingers drew away, but something squared, harder, and blunted replaced them, and when the man thrust in with greater strength than Jonah could have imagined, he realized with a horror that the object was the crucifix. The young man, painted as a sacrifice, was fucking him with the image of the Lord. It hurt, all harsh angles and pressure and inflexibility, as though he were being violated with divine judgement itself, and finally, Jonah could scream. It echoed in the church, and the young man laughed and laughed with a voice that sounded like death itself descending. 
</p><p>
	Jonah woke screaming, covered in his own come. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
	Paul Kernoa left on the morning tide, waving goodbye to Jonah, Mrs. Kernoa, and Father Manec as they stood on the beach in the grey dawn light. Watching the little boat head out beyond the rocky shore to the waiting supply boat, Jonah felt a sudden pang. He’d grown to like Paul, and Paul knew his secrets. Now, his only friends on Skara were Mrs. Kernoa, Father Manec, and the demons in his head. It would be, he decided, a rather lonely existence until Paul next returned from the Watchers. But there was nothing he could do about that, save go to penance and assist Father Manec in all his duties. 
</p><p>
	His life took on a steady normalcy after Paul’s departure. Each day, Jonah did his penance in St. Conmor’s under the watchful eye of Father Manec. He assisted in services at St. Mairaig’s. He took charity and aid to the far-flung reaches of the island outside the town. Sometimes he had time to go down to the shore and sketch, but most afternoons he spent in Father Manec’s study, taking down strongly worded letters to rival scholars, or reading the books Father Manec told him to. They were all fascinating, but none but Father Manec’s claimed that the monks from beyond the sea followed anything but a rather eccentric and perhaps not entirely orthodox version of the faith. More interesting than the monks or their potential foundation sacrifices to Jonah were the Watchers, which were apparently an object of some scholarly debate. He’d have to ask Paul more about it when Paul returned. 
</p><p>
	The dreams continued, just as filthy as they had that night, but Jonah learned to ignore them, and Father Manec seemed to consider his screaming in the mornings to be an odd but forgivable trait so long as Jonah brought him his tea and didn’t make ink blots in his letters. Jonah even prayed after he woke to try and show the world and God that he wished to be free of the nightmares, and Bastien’s rosary bead was always open on his little prie-dieu, so that he could contemplate the crucifixion image within. All in all, things passed smoothly until Paul’s return. 
</p><p>
	Paul turned up on at dusk on the night of the last full moon of summer, clutching a rucksack, wild-eyed. He looked as though he had not slept in days, and when Jonah opened the door he shoved past him, already yelling in Skara dialect for Father Manec. Father Manec, who’d been in the kitchen doing his monthly inspection of their supplies, came out dusting off his hands. 
</p><p>
	“My god, Paul, what’s wrong?” 
</p><p>
	“There’s something in the water. There are eyes in the water. I can feel them, about to open, and they’re going to do it when the Watchers are dark for the full moon, unless we all stay inside,” Paul cried, no longer in Skara dialect. 
</p><p>
	Jonah tried to place a calming hand on Paul’s shoulder. Something clearly had scared him badly, but perhaps with a good bit of prayer, he’d be alright. Paul brushed him off. 
</p><p>
	“Go away,” he hissed. “You won’t understand. But for God’s sake, Father Lindsey, don’t be rash. Don’t go to Conmor’s church. Not after nightfall, on the one night of the year when the Watchers are dark and neither God nor His Son can see the minds of the creatures of the void.” 
</p><p>
 	The rebuttal stung and the cryptic warning pricked at Jonah’s skin, but Jonah couldn’t think of anything else to say to make anything better, to make Paul understand that he was learning more about the Watchers, and the monks from beyond the sea, and that he wanted to understand. Perhaps, Jonah thought, it would be best if he left, took a walk, made some prayers at St. Conmor’s. Surely now he knew how to be safe in the sanctuary, and to make sense of the tormented hurt in his heart that stemmed from being pushed away by Paul. So he took his rosary with the trefoil bead, and he walked out into the full moonlight and began to climb the tumulus. 
</p><p>
	As he left, Jonah heard a voice behind him. It was Father Manec. 
</p><p>
	“Don’t leave! You can’t go!” he cried. “Not tonight. Stay, and listen to Paul even if he doesn’t want you too, even if he cares too much to tell you of the true horrors in the deep.” 
</p><p>
	But Jonah’s ears were shut to him. He could only go forward, propelled by some perverse desire to repent. It was the same feeling as in the dream. He needed to stop, but something beyond his will pulled him up the path and towards the darkened hulk of Conmor’s church. 
</p><p>
***
</p><p>
Jonah crossed St. Conmor’s close under the ceaseless light of the full moon. Surrounded by the high walls, he passed the dilapidated priest’s house, the gravestones like crooked teeth, and the little oratory where once an anchorite had lived, and wound his way to the church proper. All of it seemed both familiar and alien in the darkness, sinister and serene beneath the moon. St. Conmor’s Church shone bone white, its sinuous carvings etched out by shadows hiding in the curlicued vines along its walls and casting the face of the Savior in the tympanum into utter darkness. To Jonah’s eyes, the church had never looked more beautiful, or more dead. Now that he knew the markings, it was unmistakably one of the churches of the monks from beyond the sea. No other stonework could seem to move like waves. 
</p><p>
	Even as he crossed the close, Jonah remembered everything Paul had said, and wondered briefly 
</p><p>
	<em>Don’t go to Conmor’s church! Not after nightfall! Not on the one night of the year when the Watchers are dark and neither God nor His Son can see what the creatures of the void may do! </em>
</p><p>
Paul wanted him to wait, Father Manec wanted to explain, and Jonah could only see Bastien’s tearful eyes on a winter’s day almost a year before, and so he ran, trying not to think of what Father Manec had hidden about Skara, about the tumulus, about the Watchers, and about what he and Paul had meant to do and to bring Jonah into. He still had Paul’s trefoil rosary around his wrist, guiding him. He’d be protected in the darkness, and the grounds of the church were bounded in blood. Whatever Father Manec and Paul said, Jonah still knew he’d be all right, or at least hoped that was the case. With shaking hands, he pushed the door open. 
</p><p>
	He half expected a rush of screaming and gibbering noise, or at least the eerie whispers of the dreams, but all that met him was cool, incense-scented air, dormant before the morning’s Mass. The door shut behind him with a sharp clang and creak of old wood, blotting out the distant roaring of the sea as the moonlight streamed in through ancient stained glass. It cast pale colors on the floor and into the font, dancing on the dark, still water. Jonah dipped his hand in to bless himself as he approached the altar and Christ on His cross, with the tableau beneath with Conmor rejecting the king of the Outer Isles to be cast over the edge of the cliff by the ruins of first monks’ church. It was all beautiful, and it was all wrong if Father Manec was to be believed, and Jonah sank to his knees, fiddling in his cassock for his rosary. 
</p><p>
	Jonah knelt in the aisle, before the altar, and he began his prayers, begging for salvation and penitence, calling desperately upon God to save him. He wanted to be himself again, to be the Jonah who believed so strongly in his calling, who loved all his seminary lessons and doubted nothing, again. That was all. He didn’t want to remain an interloper on Skara any longer, listening to Father Manec’s theories on the foundation sacrifices of the Outer Isles, or Paul’s dire warnings about whatever it was that was in the Dead Eye. He shut his eyes until he smelled something, a harsh reek like sea and earth and damp stone that had not seen sunlight for a very, very long time. 
</p><p>
	Slowly, Jonah turned about, the words of a prayer lingering on his lips as though it might protect him, his rosary still tangled in his hands. There, standing among the pews was a young man, dressed in a brown cassock, his golden hair flowing, white in the moonlight. From beneath his sleeves, across his deathwhite hands, woad spiraled. Jonah thought he saw a trefoil entwined with the cross. It was, he realized with a start, the man from his dreams, complete with the cross painted on his high and lovely forehead. The man was everything beautiful, and in that he was horrifying, because his marks were those of the sacrifices in Father Manec’s books. He couldn’t be alive, and yet he was. 
</p><p>
	“I don’t know what you want from me!” Jonah cried. It felt good to be able to cry out at the man in the flesh, rather than simply lying there to be violated by him in sleep. “I’ve only come to do penance here. Stop… haunting me! Whatever this is, I don’t want it! I only want to repent!” 
</p><p>
	He’d learned the words of exorcism in seminary, but they left him now, and really, could you even exorcise a spirit from a church built on its body? Could you ever take death out of a building strengthened by bones? Would that make everything Father Manec shouted at his publishers about melt away from the Isles, and make them true Barriers against the falling dark again?
</p><p>
	“Penitence,” the young man said in a dry, raspy voice like the creak of a litch-gate. “What do you know of penitence? You still wear a heretic’s kiss on your lips, and when you told the keeper of it, you did not regret what you had done.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah thought of Bastien, and of what he’d told Paul at the festival. He’d loved a man enough to break his vows for him, and perhaps he’d love another man again. He thought of his dreams, struggling under the cold hands of a man walled up alive for a thousand years. A man who wore this ghost’s face. Paul and Bastien were no heretics, but Paul spoke of strange things in the water and strange sounds in the Dead Eye, and Bastien had seen nothing wrong with the union of two men, body and soul. <em>Blessed Maria, help me,</em> Jonah thought, beneath the pitiless eyes of the ghost. 
</p><p>
	“That’s why I’m here,” Jonah whispered. “I’m praying for the intercession of St. Conmor, that I might cleanse my soul.” 
</p><p>
	“And you came to Skara, in innocence, to pray away a sin you’d committed on the dull, sleeping mainland.” The ghost laughed, throwing his golden hair back and showing the red line drawn across his throat. “You know nothing of Skara, nothing of me. I don’t give forgiveness easily, priest.” 
</p><p>
	“You’re St. Conmor? But you can’t be!” 
</p><p>
	“Really,” Conmor said. “You know nothing, priest. But I can make you know. Make you forgiven. Baptise you again, and it will be punishment and paradise if you repent, and hell beyond measure if you do not.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah stood shakily. He could run. He could finish his course of prayer in St. Mairaig’s, in the malevolent shadow of the tumulus. He could run to the ruins on the headland. He could refuse to pray at all and return, shaken to the priest’s house on the close and be safe among Father Manec’s protective guidance. 
</p><p>
	“I know enough,” Jonah said, “to know that you’re no saint. You helped the monks from beyond the sea.”  
</p><p>
	The ghost laughed. 
</p><p>
	“Oh,” he said, “but I am. Perhaps you simply are considering the wrong god. My god doesn’t fear the flesh. Yours is a coward. The monks from beyond the sea knew that, and those who wrote the accounts your priest reads could never accept that the lords of the deep knew all and would cover the world in their darkness and eyes someday.” 
</p><p>
	The words pierced Jonah to the core, and he knew, with a sudden conviction stronger than anything he’d felt in that strange night, he knew he needed to run. But the ghost remained before him, standing strong. But Jonah knew how to conquer him, he was certain. He held up his trefoil rosary to the ghost, and with a peal of laughter, Conmor vanished. 
</p><p>
Jonah sighed as the moonlight fell softly through the window. He walked slowly up the aisle, rosary dangling from one hand. His feet echoed behind him all the way to the open door, and the fresh promise of the moonlight outside. It would have been easy to walk there, easy to escape and return to hear whatever it was Paul and Father Manec needed to warn him about, had he not tripped on the threshold stone. As Jonah fell, Paul’s trefoil rosary flew from his hand, landing harmlessly on the steps. It was only a breath away, a quick reach of the fingers, and he grasped towards itt and the escape it promised. 
</p><p>
His fingers grazed the silver bead just for a second, until a tremendous jerking motion at his shoulder sent him flying backward to the interior floor. Jonah yelped, and it echoed in the church. He lay prostrate on the floor, staring up at the dark vaulting, catching his breath for only a minute before there was another dragging at his back, and he felt himself slide along the rough stone. 
</p><p>
Jonah’s cry rose and deepened to a scream as whatever was behind him wrenched back his other arm and slid his rosary from his hand. There was cold all around him, and he felt chilly fingers wrapped around his wrist as he struggled and thrashed and skidded across the pavers to the foot of the altar. Jonah’s dreams flashed before his eyes, and this was somehow worse than all those images of himself laid out as an offering, of the dream-ghost’s face twisting between the face of the sacrifice, the face of Bastien, and only the night before, the face of Paul. The pain of recollection melded with the pain of the stone ripping at his cassock and biting into his flesh, and tears prickled his eyes as he scrabbled his feet desperately for purchase that he couldn’t find. 
</p><p>
Conmor’s ghost threw Jonah face first onto the altar steps. Jonah’s head struck the stone, and stars danced before his eyes, fading into blackness for a blessed minute. When his eyes fluttered open, he felt blood trickle from his nose, hot and sticky and blocking his desperate pants and futile struggles to catch his breath. He couldn’t feel his hands. His face stung, and Conmor’s tomb-breath whistled in Jonah’s ears. 
</p><p>
“I’ve got you,” the ghost said, still holding Jonah’s hands in his icy grip. 
</p><p>
Almost gently now, Conmor used the rosary to bind Jonah’s together tightly behind his back. The wooden beads dug into his skin, and Jonah thought only of the trefoil rosary, abandoned on his prie-dieu next to Bastien’s beads. The only things to protect him from whatever the ghost wanted were out of his reach, and he could only go limp in Conmor’s spectral hands as Conmor coaxed Jonah, almost gently after the fierce dragging, to his knees on the altar steps. And then, Conmor was looming before him, and shimmying out of his cassock to reveal a body painted in swirls and eyes and crosses of woad. 
</p><p>
	“You kneel before a guardian, before a saint. And you shall receive grace, or be consumed,” Conmor whispered. “The hellmouth and the things in the depths wait for all of us, especially those who bear heretical marks.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah knew it, and he knew too that he couldn’t escape the painted eyes on Conmor’s body. He remembered Father Manec’s books, and his discussions of the monks from beyond the sea in their skin boats, carrying their horrors with them. Had they been creatures of a thousand eyes, vast darkness, and the endless deep, or of the bone-freezing horror Paul thought inhabited the Dead Eye, waiting for its brethren to awaken in the depths? What beauty could they have had and promised to a boy beaten down by the vile affections of an abhorred king, and was it enough to allow himself to be walled in a hell of his own devising so that their church could grow strong? Jonah ached to ask Conmor this. He had a terrible feeling that the ghost knew all the answers. 
</p><p>
But before Jonah could ask Conmor anything, Conmor leaned over Jonah, as though he meant to administer the kiss of peace. His lips met Jonah’s, and it was unlike any kiss of peace he’d been given before, unless he counted the time in the vestry when he’d kissed the flavor of his own come from Bastien’s lips a half-hour before Mass. Conmor’s mouth tasted holy and perverse, the dark, heady sanctity of communion wine mixing with the rotten flavor of decay. Bile rose in Jonah’s throat, and he tried to think of good things, of God, of Paul’s smirk and Bastien’s smile and <em>no no no no he couldn’t. </em>The ghost had taken all the memories away, leaving him only with the dark enclosure of the embrace.
</p><p>
	“Please,” he whispered to Conmor when his cold lips left Jonah’s warm ones. “Let me go, and let me repent.” 
</p><p>
	Conmor smiled, and his teeth looked sharp in the dim light. 
</p><p>
	“Penitence, you say? When the king wanted me to repent, he’d have me suck his cock. When the monks told me to repent, before they walled me up to make the gateway stronger, they had me repent too. But they made me repent by singing songs and spilling blood. What should I do with you?” 
</p><p>
	He looked down at Jonah, kneeling there in his ripped cassock, and stroked his face. Conmor’s hand, Jonah noticed, was translucent. The shadow of white bones swam within the ghostly skin, below the rippling woad paint and above the floorboards. The sight made him reel. But the naked ghost merely floated towards him, feet skimming over stone, eyes alight with an unholy, cold fire.
</p><p>
	“A penitent ought to take communion, shouldn’t he?” Conmor said. “You’ve drunk of my blood when you kissed my mouth, and now you must eat of my flesh.” 
</p><p>
	Jonah wanted to protest. He hadn’t tasted any blood in Conmor’s awful kiss, and spirits had no flesh. Conmor’s hand descended into his hair, and suddenly, Jonah knew exactly what he’d meant. He screamed then, hoping against hope that someone would hear him, even though he knew that no one would. Even as he tried to twist his neck away, Conmor took him by the hair and shoved Jonah’s face towards his cock. Everything happened at once after that. Jonah caught a quick glimpse of the cock-- it too was covered in whirls of woad paint and stood erect and slightly translucent before him. He tried to close his mouth and end his scream, but just as he thought to do so, Conmor shoved himself inside. 
</p><p>
	The prick tasted like grave dirt and salt in Jonah’s mouth, cold as buried stone and only ever so slightly human, but he sucked desperately at it, ignoring the bitterness of the woad and the cold fingers tangled in his hair. <em>The sooner this is over, the sooner I can leave with a bit of dignity intact, </em>he thought rather wildly, trying to remember what Bastien had liked him to do with his tongue in instances like this. A hesitant lick, maybe? But that required gentleness, and there was none here. 
</p><p>
	Conmor had spoken of sacraments, but everything about his motions stripped sanctity from the moment. With a further brutal motion, he thrust deeply into Jonah’s mouth. Jonah gagged as the ghost’s cock breached his throat. He couldn’t breath. He could only sit there on aching knees with his airways blocked, feeling only a spinning dizziness as his bleeding nose was pressed flush against Conmor’s groin. Conmor’s thrusting sent him into fresh paroxysms of lightheaded panic as it increased in speed and quickening rhythm. 
</p><p>
 Tears leaked from Jonah’s eyes as he felt the ghost finally, finally release, flooding his mouth with come, then pushing him away. Jonah collapsed forward onto the cold flagstones before the altar, his throat dry, his body shaking, a trickle of phantom spend dribbling from his mouth. He wanted to curl into himself and sob, but Conmor’s hands were stern as he pulled Jonah back upright and yanked him to his feet, half-dragging him up the altar, baring Jonah’s defiled face before the crucifix and the impassive eyes of God. 
</p><p>
Jonah stumbled up the steps, his mouth dry and raw, gasping for air, and Conmor smiled at him. His sharp teeth shone through his pale, dead lips as he pulled Jonah to the altar, bathed in a shaft of moonlight from the one empty window in the clerestory. Jonah’s heart sank when he saw the empty surface, the expanse of empty white cloth. As usual, Father Manec had cleared the surface as Jonah did his penance prayers that morning. All that remained upon the altar was a crucifix. Conmor smiled with all the beatific glow of a saint, and then, with an inhuman strength, he flung Jonah upon the altar. Jonah landed face first against the cool cloth and the hard stone, feeling more blood trickle from his already aching nose. His bound hands burned. 
</p><p>
“Please untie me,” he whispered, hating how hoarse, how ruined, his voice sounded. 
</p><p>
“That can be arranged,” Conmor murmured. “But only if you promise to stay very still.” 
</p><p>
Jonah did, and the pressure of the rosary beads digging into his hands lessened, even as the tomb-stench all around him increased. Then there was a sensation of plucking and pushing against his body, and he realized with horror that even as he flexed his hands to work the blood back into them, Conmor was already pushing up his cassock. 
</p><p>
“Hands up,” the ghost said. “A true penitent must meet God bare in the flesh he was given.” 
</p><p>
Jonah closed his eyes as the ghost pulled off the cassock and attended to his smallclothes. His attentions at Jonah’s crotch were rather more perfunctory. Conmor simply grasped the waist of the undergarments and <em>pulled.</em> Jonah heard cloth ripping, and then felt cold hands grasping at his hips, bruising tight. He could feel himself lying there upon the altar, humiliatingly open, his arse in the air, unable to see anything but the moonlight flowing through the open door. He gasped then, as a cold finger circled his hole. It was greasy, and Jonah realized with a start that Conmor must be using some of the sacral oil kept in the treasury to work Jonah open. Wanting to scream, he found that he could only sob.
</p><p>
“Pray,” Conmor whispered in Jonah’s ear. Jonah could hear the words, but feel no breath accompanying him. “Pray for forgiveness and for trespass in my holy realm. You’ve violated the boundaries of my domain. I died to keep this place sacred, and you’ve defiled it with your lusts.” 
</p><p>
	Then he shoved himself into Jonah. 
</p><p>
	The pain was intense, a sharp, burning <em>fullness</em> that made Jonah sob. Hot tears prickled his eyes as Conmor began to thrust. The ghost was cold inside him, as though he’d been stuffed full of ice or of damp stone, and the pain was too much. He began to pray, shouting useless words into the stone as Conmor pulled his hips back for better purchase. The ghost thrust deeper, brushing against a spot within him that sent an agonizing pleasure soaring through Jonah’s veins and making him utterly, horribly breathless. 
</p><p>
	“Pray,” Conmor whispered. “Thank your God for allowing me to give you to him in sacrifice.” 
</p><p>
Jonah thought he must have blacked out, what with the rocking, the pain, the furious rhythm of cold dead flesh against his living flesh, but he couldn’t have. Instead, after that one moment of blessed darkness, everything became sensation, horrifying and beautiful. Everything was too vivid in the moonlight, from the press of the cock within him and the way his prayers commingled with his moans as if he sang some unholy hymn. 
</p><p>
“Thank you,” Jonah sobbed into his arm, as he knew the ghost wanted him to. “Thank you, God, for allowing me to repent through the aid of Your servant Conmor.” 
</p><p>
<em>And thank you, Conmor, for not fucking me with the cross, </em>he thought. That spurred him to action, remembering, at last, Father Manec’s advice. Shuddering with pain and with the strange pleasure shooting through his body, Jonah reached with scrabbling hands to touch the base of the cross on the altar. He reached it just as Conmor let out an almighty groan and spent within Jonah, a sensation that felt like cold and fire mixed. Shaking, and with the last of his strength, Jonah threw the cross at Conmor. 		
</p><p>
“Go back to your dead gods and your lords of the deep” he cried. “Leave me alone!” 
</p><p>
	The ghost vanished, but his laughter remained.<br/>
“Too late!” Conmor called. “The sacrifice is finished and the circle is complete.” 
</p><p>
Then he was gone, leaving only the stench of rot behind him and a tingling in Jonah’s arms. His voice still echoed in the empty church as Jonah peeled his aching body from the altar and stumbled down the aisle. But Jonah decided to ignore it as he pulled himself,  naked, into the moonlight on the church steps, stopping to pick up his rosary. Only once he left the close did he look around. Jonah drew his breath in sharply as he stood in the night wind. 
</p><p>
Outside the close, the night was dark, and the sea sounded, far below the tumulus, as though it were boiling with the whispers from the dream cathedral. Relieved and a little frightened, Jonah looked up to see the stars, and reassure himself of his safety. But where he expected to see the moon or the darkened ceiling of a cathedral above him, the sky was bright with a thousand staring eyes. 
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This fic brought to you by Bede's <i>Ecclesiastical History of the English People</i>, several <i>vitae</i> for Irish saints, an incurable love for making up islands and handwavy fantasy universes, and mainlining way too much Dylan Thomas. Anyhow, this was an incredibly fun piece to write and I hope you enjoy it, because I deeply enjoyed reading your prompts. </p><p>Now, a few notes: This borrows a lot from Celtic Christianity, and a lot of the architecture, aesthetics, and names (parish closes, Mrs. Kernoa's coif) here are specifically Breton. However, Conmor's life is based a whole lot on Hrotsvit of Gandersheim's poem about the martyrdom of Pelagius of Córdoba (although Pelagius is not ever turned into a foundation sacrifice, obvi, nor does the poem have anything to do with eldritch sea entities). The sacrifice bits are, in their turn, a little bit inspired by Oran of Iona, because that whole legend is just delightfully creepy and I couldn't resist throwing it into a story with a malevolent foundation sacrifice ghost. </p><p>Title from 'Author's Prologue' by Dylan Thomas.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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